Obie Award-winning performer, director and poet Laurie Smith Carlos, who made an indelible mark on New York's avant-garde theater scene before relocating to the Twin Cities in midlife and mentoring a generation of artists here, died Thursday of colon cancer. She was 67.

The Twin Cities artistic community was reeling Friday. "She's a remarkable artist and it's a big loss," said Philip Bither, the senior performing arts curator at the Walker Art Center.

A multidisciplinary artist, Carlos won accolades for her dynamic range of work, from a 1977 Obie for her role in the original production of Ntozake Shange's "For colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf" to two New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards as a choreographer of her original plays, to a 2004 Bush Foundation artistic fellowship.

Carlos was a member of Urban Bush Women, the acclaimed contemporary dance company that tells the stories of women of the African diaspora, and was a stage director who premiered works by young playwrights who would go on to fame, such as Suzan-Lori Parks.

Her artistic career brought the New York City native to the Twin Cities throughout the 1990s, where she took the stage at the Walker and the Guthrie, before moving here for a position at Penumbra Theatre Company in 1998.

"There's no one that knew Laurie that wouldn't call her a singular individual," said Lou Bellamy, Penumbra's founder. "She was her own person, her own artist; she put the world as she knew it on stage with real style and understanding, and she lived her art."

As an artistic fellow at Penumbra, Carlos helped identify scripts to produce, with a goal of "bringing more feminine voices into the theater," Bellamy said.

From there, she continued to amplify the voices of other artists as a longtime mentor with Naked Stages, a fellowship for emerging artists, currently based at Pillsbury House Theatre.

"She in many ways is an unsung hero to so many," said Eleanor Savage, program director of the Jerome Foundation. She founded Naked Stages and knew Carlos for two decades.

"Many people think of her as an oracle," Savage said, "because she talked in metaphorical, very poetic ways, but she was always delivering truth in whatever way she was communicating with you."

Carlos also curated Pillsbury House's Late Nite Series of new works by underground artists from both New York and Minnesota. The program "was a kind of a bridge between the two" theater scenes, said Pillsbury House co-artistic director Noël Raymond.

Between those two programs, Carlos supported hundreds of artists, many of them people of color.

Singer Mankwe Ndosi considered Carlos "one of my art mamas." She said Carlos was an "old-school teacher, in that she was not always sweet and tender, but she would help you find the truth inside of you and pull that from you."

Author Shannon Gibney met Carlos at a black writers' retreat, where Carlos was a mentor delivering the hard truth to her charges. "She said something like, 'I go into people's houses and I burn them down.' And what she was talking about was people's artistic houses," Gibney said. "She was just there, always mentoring, and always supporting, and always challenging."

As an actor, Carlos cultivated a unique performance style that tapped into rhythmic gestures as much as text. Bellamy still uses that "gestural language" he learned from her at Penumbra.

Carlos was as much a force offstage, where she was constantly nurturing her community. She made it a tradition to cook large meals for artists and audiences before her shows. And she would smooth out conflicts behind the scenes. One oft-told story involved a tense time among staffers at Penumbra, which Carlos defused by gathering everyone together for a 15-minute session of laughter.

Carlos gave up her home base in St. Paul several years ago, but continued to work here, as well as New York, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. She came back here in September to narrate a play at In the Heart of the Beast puppet theater and was hospitalized after the show's first weekend. That's when she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

The next weekend, she was back on stage in what would be her final performance.

Women on the Line explores the formal and metaphorical implications of lines. To suggest that someone or something is "on the line" is to acknowledge both its vulnerability and necessity. Women on the Line completes an exchange of exhibitions of women artists at two artist-run galleries, A.I.R. Gallery in New York and Studio 44 in Stockholm.

TRIANGLES - Witnesses of the Holocaust is a Performance Installation piece created by trans-media artist Ann P Meredith created to honor the lives, persecution, and deaths of the numerous types of people who were forced to wear the various colors of TRIANGLES during the Holocaust.

TRIANGLES utilizes Art, Film, Photography, Sculpture and Live participation by The Artist.

Ann P Meredith was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1948. She is an artist, fine art photographer, writer, director, producer, adjunct professor and community arts organizer who has worked for over four decades at home and abroad to help give a realistic and compassionate face and voice to people and cultures who have been injured, oppressed, marginalized, under-recognized and therefore underserved.

Ann's work is in The Smithsonian, The Library of Congress, The New York and San Francisco Public Libraries, The Schlesinger at Harvard University, numerous Museum and Private Collections and The UCLA Film & Television Archives in Hollywood among others.

Frank Moore, FF Alumn, featured in a new episode of the web video series about his life and art, LET ME BE FRANK

Let Me Be Frank
Episode 5 - A Channel, Not A Creator

Episode 5, "A Channel, Not A Creator", of the LET ME BE FRANK web documentary series has just been released. This episode features readings by Kayla Moon and Edna Floretta, and a new animated segment, "How To Handle An Anthropologist", which features interviews from the upcoming book by the same name, a collection of 12 years of conversations between anthropologist Russell Shuttleworth, PhD and Frank Moore. This episode also includes a reading of Frank's poem, "Tribal Performance" and features music by Frank Moore, Vinnie Spit Santino, Phog Masheeen, +DOG+, Sander Roscoe Wolff, Fluff Grrl, Two Loons For Tea, and Tha Archivez.

Let Me Be Frank is a video series based on the life and art of shaman, performance artist, writer, poet, painter, rock singer, director, TV show host, teacher and bon vivant, Frank Moore.

The series is partly a biography, but also a presentation of Frank's philosophy on life and on art. Twenty-plus episodes have been planned based on Frank's book, Art Of A Shaman, which was originally delivered as a lecture at New York University in 1990 as part of the conference "New Pathways in Performance". Each episode will feature readings by people who played an important part in Frank's life, either as friends, lovers, students, artistic collaborators or supporters of his art.

Let Me Be Frank presents Frank's exploration of performance and art as being a magical way to effect change in the world ... performance as an art of melting action, of ritualistic shamanistic doings/playings. Using Frank's career and life as a "baseline", it explores this dynamic playing within the context of reality shaping.

Rubin Foundation grantee Ping Chong + Company will present an excerpt of its recent performance project Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity in dialogue with artist Rehan Ansari whose play Unburdened is featured in Enacting Stillness. Ping Chong + Company's Beyond Sacred is part of Undesirable Elements, an ongoing series of interview-based theater works examining issues of culture, identity and difference in the lives of individuals in specific communities. There have been over 50 productions in the series since 1992. Presented as a chamber piece of story-telling, a "seated opera for the spoken word," these performances are tailored to suit the needs and issues facing specific communities. With his background in investigative reporting, Ansari's play Unburdened was developed through research methods stemming from journalistic practice. The evening will feature readings from each script, followed by a panel discussion. The excerpt of Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity will be read by Tiffany Yasmin Abdelghani, Ferdous Dehqan, Kadin Herring, Amir Khafagy, and Maha Syed, who are telling their own true stories. The excerpt of Unburdened will be read by Charlie Gillette, Mia Darrow Tarley, and Rehan Ansari.

Rehan Ansari is a Brooklyn-based writer. Born in Karachi and a graduate of Vassar College, Ansari was working as a journalist in New York during 9/11 and in Mumbai during the attacks of 2008. He traveled to Pakistan in the aftermath of both events and Unburdened is based on his experiences. His work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Globe & Mail, and as a weekly columnist for Mid-day Mumbai. He was Editor of The Independent Press Association-New York and Foreign Editor of the Daily News & Analysis in Mumbai. Ansari's play Damme This is the Oriental Scene for You! (adapted from the writings of G.V. Desani) was staged at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. He is currently working on a novel.

Ping Chong + Company produces theatrical works addressing the important cultural and civic issues of our times, striving to reach the widest audiences with the greatest level of artistic innovation and social integrity. The company was founded in 1975 by leading theatrical innovator Ping Chong with a mission to create works of theater and art that explore the intersections of race, culture, history, art, media and technology in the modern world. Today, Ping Chong + Company produces original works by a close-knit ensemble of affiliated artists, under the artistic leadership of Ping Chong. Productions range from intimate oral history projects to grand scale cinematic multidisciplinary productions featuring puppets, performers, and full music and projection scores. The art reveals beauty, precision, and a commitment to social justice.

To learn more about the cast and event, please click here.

Slow to a Halt:
New Performances by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful and Alicia Grullón
Friday, January 13
6 to 8pm

RSVP: media@sdrubin.org

Two artists featured in the exhibition Enacting Stillness, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful and Alicia Grullón use slowness and silence in their performative interventions in public spaces of New York City. Estévez and Grullón's projects, currently on view at The 8th Floor, contain video and object based ephemera that engage with issues of gentrification, labor conditions, immigration, and the role of art in civic life. Their performances on January 13 will mark the closing of the exhibition Enacting Stillness.

For his new piece entitled //, Estévez Raful will offer hands-on-healing sessions to assist individuals in attaining energetic balance and to reconnect with the larger flow of life. Estévez Raful conceives of the act of care as a choreography that combines dance and stillness, tangible visuals and mental visualizations, and sound and silence with healing. Likewise, he envisions creating a vibrational sculpture defined by the outer walls containing the room where // takes place, to be experienced by an audience at a purely intuitive level.

Alicia Grullón's The Rule Is Love is a durational performance that deals with the normalization of acts of exclusion, spectatorship, apathy, and conformity. Through the piece, Grullón seeks to question the systems which constitute these conditions forming our epistemic base. The Rule Is Love augments Grullón's work and practices dealing with critiques on the politics of presence, making an argument for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. Inspired by citizen action movements, her response to social justice issues comes from an impulse to chronicle and witness, taking into close account the intersection of race, class, gender, politics and activism. Grullón writes, "Ultimately, I do my work to decolonize the world through art."